End of the World
by Eveilae
Summary: [character death] See, sometimes you lose people, and it hurts, but people are always losing people. Get it? It’s like…well, you love people, but love isn’t everything, because it ends. Ends like when you’re done kissing someone.


_i do not own naruto or the song End of the World sung by Skeeter Davis.  
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_warning: **character death**. no spoilers.__

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_Why does the sun go on shining?  
Why does the sea rush to shore? _

See, sometimes you lose people, and it hurts, but people are always losing people. Get it? It's like…well, you love people, but love isn't everything, because it ends. Ends like when you're done kissing someone. Ends like when an ice cream cone slips out of your fingers and is left only as a melting puddle on the hot concrete. 

But…that doesn't stop them from trying to reason it out. Neji and Tenten can't comprehend it, a force so powerful that if could take away something as steady and firm as the earth itself. Nothing was less flexible than Rock Lee. And no amount of fate can make what has happened sound like a truth. There's numbness along with that confusion, and a strong refusal to cry. They stand there alongside of everyone else, their forms standing tall and proud and as firm as Lee ever was. Eyes dry.

And they might say it's because Lee would not have wanted them to cry, but that's a lie. He's dead and they both know that at this point, he doesn't care either way. This is as selfish an action as the sobbing of a grieving wife every time she steps outside and realizes that when she comes back from work she's returning to an empty house. They don't want to cry, because crying would mean that it hurts. It would mean that such a thing has wounded them, and _no one_ wounds them, do you understand?!

IT DOESN'T HURT.

Not one little bit, you see?

_Don't they know it's the end of the world?  
'Cause you don't love me anymore._

Sometimes you take things for granted. The noise that someone makes every day when they come home, that honey, I'm home noise that _grates_ on your nerves until suddenly, one day no one is calling you honey, and the only noise is that of the wind, blowing not through empty trees, but past people that are walking home to bright kitchens. Maybe not happy kitchens, but probably happier kitchens than yours.

That is the sound that Hinata misses, and Shino know he can never duplicate it. Hinata knows how to express grief, she understand the concept, but not the getting past it Not the coping. She's never coped with a thing in her entire life. She's pasted things on top of it, things like adoration and blushes and a gentle kindness she only half means. So she tries to smile, tries to force her lips to flatten themselves into a mask's false grin. But her lips will not even turn down. They cannot stop shaking.

Neither can her hands, and Shino holds them and feels her trembling. Silence is what he's comfortable in, and silence was the thing that Kiba most abhorred. Shino, the skeptic, the cynic, silent spectator of life, he brings Hinata's fingertips to his lips, gently pressing them against his mouth for a second before letting go. He clasps his own hands together, closes his eyes to sunny scene with all the coffins laid out in a careful row, and he prays. Hinata gives him an odd look, then closes her own eyes in deference.

They pray out loud to a god that looks down upon a puppy and finds him a home. Or a god that looks down upon a sad child and finds him a puppy.

_Why do the birds go on singing?  
Why do the stars glow above?_

There are words for everthing, or almost everything. And in the dictionary, if you read it long enough, you can find a synonym for death, for sadness, for fear. For loneliness. Shikamaru knew those words, so Choji and Ino didn't need to. He had them in his head somewhere, but he'd only telling them how bothersome it all was. How very little use anything but simply existing was.

He was right. The not existing is like a stab to the heart. A waste isn't a waste for everyone. Spending money on your favorite thing in the world, your very favorite thing, maybe spending too much money, is that a waste? Some people say so. Some people refuse to look up at the endless sky, call it a waste. Ino used to do that, but she isn't so sure anymore. Does that mean he was a waste, that his life spent in simply being and observing and knowing, does that—

No, it doesn't, Choji seems to say with the arm he has thrown over her shoulder. And he's crying, and he's wondering why he's the only one. Everyone else is so silent in their own emotions, except for the whispering pair beside them. But there _are_ other people sobbing, Choji simply can't make them out over his own cries. Ino feels his whole body shaking with the weight of his tears, and she knows that he's crying for the both of them.

Some people would say that these heavy globules of water are a waste. He's gone, he's dead, and they're really sad for themselves because they miss him, not because he's been killed. Useless.

If you follow that line of reasoning, everything's useless and pointless because nothing starts without an end in sight.

Useless, see, like asking a stupid fat boy if he wants to waste the clouds just slip by. Useless, like trying to look pretty for best friends rather than boys because they were the first ones to call you pretty. Useless, like eating what you love despite what might happen at the end of the line.

Useless…like having someone love who you've become?

I don't know, maybe useless isn't the word you're looking for. Try the thesaurus, or ask a good friend.

_Don't they know it's the end of the world?  
It ended when I lost your love._

Have you every asked someone that's had a near-death experience if they regret it?

Maybe they appreciate life more, and taste every bit of cake they receive for the rest of their life. That what they tell you anyway, because if they told you what they feel in their hearts, maybe you'd cry. And even people who hate so bitterly that it almost bleeds have someone that they never want to make cry.

Gaara wonders why he stepped so close to death and they shied away from it at the last moment. He wonders why he's the one who can't die, who's been targeted time after time after. Damn. Time. And he's unkillable.

But Temari and Kankurou in their pink little shells, oh, they're so susceptible to that human mystery. That skin, it's their real skin, and soft, not like his, which is rough and grainy and if he rubs too hard, starts to come off.

And he feels guilty for possibly the first time. That usual guilt, that guilt that people are tried of hearing about. You know the kind, like when you are angry and wish suddenly, without reason, that your son not return from school today. You doesn't care how, just that he doesn't appear in that doorway again with that scowl and that attitude. And the phone rings and your son has been hit by a car and he's dead. Dead, as if your wish made it happen. That kind of terrible guilt, even if you don't believe in that kind of thing.

The kind of guilt you can't escape because it's got no real basis, see? Survivor's guilt. There's guilt for everything nowadays; it's our newest addiction. Believe me, believe him…it's not so easy to say that you could never have stopped it. Not so easy to say that it's not your fault. When you're alive and they're gone, somehow, everything's your fault.

_I wake up in the morning and I wonder  
Why everything's the same as it was.  
I can't understand.  
No, I can't understand.  
How life goes on the way it does._

There are some things you can solve with anger; Sasuke has always believed this. If you hold enough hate in your chest, and you keep swallowing and swallowing until it explodes just where you want it to, you can get anything you want. The truth is, he's always spoiled himself rotten.

Rotten…apple…core.

There are some things you can solve with sheer happiness; Naruto has always held on to this. He couldn't have lasted otherwise, do you see? If he had ever allowed sadness to really seep into him like water in a sponge, he might have done something drastic, something terrible. Something like hating so powerfully that you'll just kill and you won't care who you kill, and you. Just. Keep.

Killing.

Until too many are dead.

And too many is one.

The only thing Naruto and Sasuke never did was allow their sadness to express itself in its pure, unadulterated form. They're not with everyone else. They're not standing there in black robes, staring at what they've lost.

(their core)

No, they're standing here, at this place where their trained, and for the first time became one powerful circle. And Naruto, he throws back his head and he hoooooooooooooowls. Sasuke, he lays her hitai-ate on the ground next to his crossed legs. And he talks to it, and speaks plainly to the person who can no longer hear him. Honesty is one that Team 7 thought they understood until the secrets they kept can never be told.

Do you understand now?

Maybe not.

That's okay. You will.

_Why does my heart go on beating?  
Why do these eyes of mine cry?  
Don't they know it's the end of the world.?  
It ended when you said goodbye._


End file.
